I'm new to Blu Ray discs, but is there any benefit to getting the Blu Ray version of old movies that I already own on DVD? For example, are classic movies like Casablanca or even late 80's or 90's movies even shot in HD to benefit from the additional resolution? How about for animated Disney or newer Pixar movies?

Alien is arguably the best looking movie in my nearly 300 disc blu-ray collection. However, not all catalog titles have great or even good looking blu-ray transfers. My collection of the 1st 6 Star Treks movies is pretty mediocre at best.

I don't have too many of the traditional classics like gone with the wind, Casablanca etc but I am interested in getting some of them at some point, but I do own lots of older movies such as Tora! Tora! Tora!, citizen cane, and 2001 and they all look much better on my 65 inch Mits DLP then the dvd counterparts. I also have a good amount of 80's movies (lots of brat pack type movies and others such as legend, dark crystal, and labyrinth) and again they look better then most standard def versions, but again 5 star quality is not always the case. That being said I have been very happy with the overall picture quality that blu-ray offers over standard def content.

Audio quality on all blu-rays (at least most, there have been some bad apples here and there) has been superb, but one can only benefit from this aspect of HD content if you a have a decent surround sound set up and not a chincy htib or sound bar, or plain tv speakers. Listening to the tangerine dream soundtrack when watching legend for example just plain sounds awesome on my relatively modest 5.2+wides set up. Highly likely my living room theater area sounds better then when this movie was first released in theaters back in the early 80's.

Better yet, most every Blu-ray of "spectaculars" - think Sound of Music, South Pacific, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, How the West Was Won, etc. - look better than they've ever looked on home video before.

But for me at this time of year, the BD of It's a Wonderful Life looks absolutely amazing.

I'm new to Blu Ray discs, but is there any benefit to getting the Blu Ray version of old movies that I already own on DVD? For example, are classic movies like Casablanca or even late 80's or 90's movies even shot in HD to benefit from the additional resolution? How about for animated Disney or newer Pixar movies?

Remember: movies were once shot on film which has greater than HD resolution.

Quality of the Blu-ray will depend on the state of the original material and the care taken in digitizing it, but the results can be spectacular.

See the pre-1979 review thread linked in my signature. Start at the end and work backwards and you will find classics on Blu-ray, although many of the reviews are still for DVD.

Bill: Since this topic has come up before, I'll ask that you bump one of the existing threads. Another option is to review the PQ sticky thread for picture qualty discussion of movies already released, including "old" movies.